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Thursday, April 5, 2018

BSNL adds 4 mn customers in March 2018: Report

BHARAT Sanchar Nigam Ltd added over 4 million customers in March. "BSNL takes a big leap by achieving gross subscriber addition of more than 4 million in the month of March 2018. BSNL has also added 1.2 million subscribers through MNP during the month," the state-owned telecom firm said in a statement.
BSNL attributed the success to attractive schemes, plans, offers, value added service offerings and with network improvement, to add new connections and... increased subscriber addition through MNP. BSNL Director (CM) RK Mittal said that the company has big plans to further intensify its efforts for better network coverage and more focus on customer satisfaction.
The state-owned telecom operator will invest about Rs 4,300 crore to expand networkBSE -4.85 % in 2018-19, and another Rs 5,000-6,000 crore is likely to be the utilised for government telecom projects.
The investment of Rs 4,300 crore earmarked for BSNL's own expansion will primarily go into strengthening the mobile network, upgrading broadband infrastructure and strengthening the core network, its Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava told PTI.
"Rs 5,000 to 6,000 crore will be spent on the government projects like Bharat Net, Network for Spectrum, the Comprehensive Telecom Development Plan for North East, as well as boosting connectivity to Andaman with optical fibre network, and others," he said.
Other government projects that BSNL is executing include providing bandwidth to Lakshadweep Islands, and connecting remote areas of Arunachal Pradesh, he said.
"Government is investing in large connectivity projects, where private players are not going. BSNL is being used as one of the vehicles to execute those projects and we do that work on behalf of government," he said.
As per the latest report by telecom regulator, BSNL had 9.40 per cent share of mobile services market as on January 31 and had added 3.96 lakh customers during that month.
One of the loss making PSUs, BSNL, along with Air India and MTNL incurred 55.66 per cent of the total losses suffered by the top ten loss-making CPSEs in 2016-17.